I put on my warmest flannel nightgown and got into bed, but I knew it would be a long time before I could sleep, with the thought of those creatures in the woods, so I opened the old book Nicky had given me. A notecard marked the ballad of William Duffy. I opened it and read the note from Nicky.
A good teacher is a door to other worlds, she had written. Thanks for opening so many doors for me.
Feeling grateful for Nicky’s kind words, I propped the notecard up on my night table and turned to the ballad of William Duffy. The story was much as Nicky had summarized it, until I reached the part where the fairy girl gave half her brooch to William Duffy as a token that she would return for him. Nicky hadn’t described the brooch, but Mary McGowan had.
The brooch was made of two interlocking hearts. Where the two hearts overlapped was a stone. When she broke the brooch in half, the fairy girl kept the half with the stone.
The detail sparked a memory. I got out of bed and rummaged through my jewelry box until I found the silver brooch my mother had given to me. She’d explained that it was an heirloom from my father’s family, passed down through the generations, and was called a Luckenbooth brooch after the shop stalls in Edinburgh where they were once sold. Originally the brooch had been shaped with two interlocking hearts, but at some time it had been broken, leaving a loop where the other heart had overlapped. Could this brooch be the one the fairy girl had broken in half?
I went back to the story, searching for another clue, but the rest was much as Nicky had related it. There was, however, an interesting note from the author at the end of the tale.
I heard this story from an old woman in the village of Ballydoon, who said that William Duffy was her nephew. She told me that after William disappeared, a strange weeping girl appeared in the village, dressed in rags. The villagers thought she’d perhaps been tampered with by reivers in the Greenwood. A local family took her in and nursed her back to health, but she always remained peculiar—she talked but little and was afraid to touch iron and would not go to kirk. Nonetheless, a good man of the village fell in love with her and married her. She gave birth to a girl the following year. All might have been well enough, but around that time the witch hunters came to Ballydoon and sent for her to be brought before them in the kirk. One of the villagers warned her, though, and, rather than be taken by these brutes, the peculiar girl ran into the Greenwood and was never seen again. The old woman who told me the story said she believed the girl had tried to escape back into Faerie but was lost because of the Fairy Queen’s curse. She believed this because she never saw her nephew William again and so she knew the fairy girl had not been able to save him. The old woman told me that although the villagers called her Katy, the girl’s name was Cailleach, and she showed me the half brooch she had left behind for her daughter.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. If Mary McGowan had walked into the room and whispered the news that she had found the origin of my kind, I could not have been more startled. I felt as though she was speaking to me across the centuries. I turned back to the book, but the next page was the ballad of the Lass of Lochroyan, which, as far as I could tell from a quick perusal, was nearly identical to a version that appeared in Scott’s Minstrelsy. I leafed through the rest of the book and found a selection of classic ballads from the Scottish Border Country. In no other ballad had the author added a personal note like the one at the end of William Duffy.
Frustrated, I closed my eyes, which stung from staring at the small, faded print of the old book, and tried to work out what Mary McGowan’s note meant for me. I’d guessed that my ancestor had a connection with the incubus, but now I knew for sure. I wondered what had happened to the stone that had once been in the brooch …
My head swirling with the details of the story and the hundreds of years between its telling and my birth, I fell into a fitful sleep and a dream as restless as my thoughts.
I was running across a meadow, searching for someone. Following in my footsteps were my fairy companions. We were all in danger. I kept looking back over my shoulder to see if we were being pursued. The woods on either side of the meadow were full of shadows. I heard the skitter of claws scraping bark and the heavy thunk of leathery wings crashing through the branches. I had to open a door into Faerie to save my companions and myself, but how? The air shimmered in front of me and I saw him: William, my Greenwood lover, mounted on a giant white steed. He had come to find me, even though it wasn’t yet All Hallows’ Eve. And I didn’t have the stone! Still, he reached for me. I reached for him but could see my arms fading. I tried to hold on to William’s arms, but they passed right through me. I was vanishing into thin air …
I awoke, arms flailing, grasping for something solid to hold on to, to keep from fading into nothingness. My hand hit the edge of the night table, hard enough to bring me fully awake and send something skittering across the floor … claws scraping bark …
I jumped to my feet, scanning the predawn shadows of my bedroom for the winged creatures in my dream. But then I saw a glint of silver on the floor beneath the window and padded cautiously over to it, keeping my eyes on the window for winged monsters. I knelt and picked up the silvery object, which turned out to be the Luckenbooth brooch. The half brooch. I traced the heart with my fingers and noticed that along the inside rim of the heart were little bumps. I’d seen them before and always thought they were part of the design, but now, looking more closely at them, I saw that they were prongs that had been worn down by time. Prongs that had once held a stone. I held the brooch up to the window. The milky light of dawn filled the loop inside the heart and glowed there like an opal—like a tear-shaped opal. An angel’s tear. At some time, my brooch had held the angel stone.
Although it was only five in the morning, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. Pulling a warm fleece hoodie over T-shirt and leggings, I slipped the brooch into the pocket to keep it close by me. Then I went downstairs, made coffee, and spent the next few hours searching for more information on the angel stone or the hallow door—and finding nothing. I emailed Frank and Soheila, telling them I’d like to talk to them both later about a research topic for this winter’s MLA conference. We’d agreed that MLA would be code for need to talk. The code worked.
It was barely light out when I heard a knock at my door and opened it to find Frank, Soheila, and, more surprising, Mac Stewart on my front porch.
“Frank was worried by your email,” Soheila said, giving me a meaningful look.
“I was worried, too,” Mac said, slapping his flannel-covered chest. “You shouldn’t have gone into the woods with that man, Callie. He’s a”—Mac lowered his voice and leaned in to whisper—“vampire!”
“I know, Mac,” I said, “but he’s a perfectly well-behaved one. He wanted to warn me about some blood-drained creatures he’s found in the woods …” I looked past the porch to the trees on the edge of my property. Even in the morning light, the woods had taken on a menacing look.
“Yes, we need to talk about that, too,” said Soheila, “but right now Mac has something he needs to tell you. May we come in?”
“Of course!” I said quickly, embarrassed I’d kept them standing on the porch so long—not that I had anything in particular to hide in my house, but I felt that, with her acute senses, Soheila might pick up some residue of the dreams I’d been having. As I opened the door, I found myself sniffing the air, as if erotic dreams would have a particular scent, but all I smelled was a delicious aroma wafting out of a bag Mac carried.